Neil Oliver (born 21 February 1967) is a British television presenter, freelance archaeologist, conservationist and author. He is best known as a presenter of several BBC historical and archaeological documentary series, including A History of Scotland, Vikings and Coast. In 2017 he was appointed president of the National Trust for Scotland.[2] His Scottish accent and long hair are distinguishing features.[3]

Oliver's television debut came in 2002 with BBC Two's Two Men in a Trench, which featured Oliver and close friend, Tony Pollard, visiting historic British battlefields and recreating the battle situations using state of the art archaeological techniques. In addition to the TV series, Oliver co-wrote the two accompanying books.

In 2005, he wrote a tie-in book for the Channel 4 documentary, Not Forgotten, which was presented by Ian Hislop. Oliver then became the archaeological and social history expert on Coast and in the next series he replaced Nicholas Crane as the show's main presenter and remained as such for the third and fourth series.

In 2006 Oliver appeared in two more documentary series, Channel 4's The Face of Britain and BBC Two's Scotland's History: The Top Ten. In August 2006 he also appeared on the special "Big Royal Dig" edition of Channel 4's Time Team, in which he presented a dig at Holyrood Palace.

Oliver was a contributor to BBC One's The One Show in the summer of 2007. He also appeared that year as one of the presenters of BBC Two series The History Detectives.

On 23 March 2009, Neil Oliver presented a programme on Cleopatra on BBC One.

In February 2011 he presented A History of Ancient Britain on BBC Two.[6] This was followed later in the year by A History of Celtic Britain. He also provided the voice over for VisitScotland's 2011 television advertisement.[7] Oliver also hosted The Last Explorers, a four-episode series retracing the expeditions of four Scottish explorers (David Livingstone, William Speirs Bruce, John Muir, and Thomas Blake Glover) who planted ideas rather than flags, that screened on BBC for four weeks from 24 November 2011.

Oliver presented the three-part series Vikings 11 September 2012 – 25 September 2012.

In 2015, he presented Britain's Deadliest Rail Disaster: Quintinshill about the Quintinshill rail disaster, which took place in 1915.

In 2015 he co-presented a 3-part BBC TV documentary with Alice Roberts, entitled The Celts: Blood, Iron and Sacrifice,[8] and the following year continued his Coast series with Coast New Zealand.

Neil Oliver also presented a BBC documentary called Scotland and the Klan, highlighting the Scottish/Northern Irish foundations of the Ku Klux Klan, originally aired in October 2016.

In December 2016, Oliver was involved in episode 2 of the Celebrity Series of Robot Wars, helping create a robot called "Soldier Ant", which he drove with his children. It won one game (on a judges' decision), but lost the other two on knockout and was eliminated.[9]

In May 2014, Oliver stated in an interview with The Herald, that he was "proud of Britain" and noted his dislike of the forthcoming Scottish independence referendum saying that he found "this kind of internecine squabbling puts my teeth on edge. I would rather that it would just go away – or that it had never happened." He went on to say that he "liked the status quo."[15] When he was appointed President of the National Trust for Scotland, thousands signed petitions calling on him to resign.[16]